Barely 30 per cent of Egyptians think the country is
headed in the right direction -- and equally, 30 per cent feel they are worse
off today than they were under the sclerotic kleptocracy of former dictator
Hosni Mubarak, according to the Pew survey, based on 1,000 face-to-face
interviews conducted in March.

The findings also suggest "political divisions
are growing deeper," with supporters of Islamist parties and the more
secular opposition taking increasingly different views of Egypt's key
challenges.

The good news? Well, Pew says its new data shows
"most Egyptians believe democracy is they best form of government, and
they embrace key principals and institutions. For example, majorities describe
having a free press and a fair judiciary as very important."

But democracy, thus far, is not seen as working for
them the way it should, with 56 per cent of Egyptians dissatisfied with the way
it is playing out. And as the unrest continues, the concept of stability, as
opposed to one person/one vote, is becoming increasingly popular.

Says Pew: "While more than half continue to say
that, if they had to choose, they would prioritize democracy over stability,
the percentage favouring stability is on the rise."

Where, then, are Egyptians united? In the dislike of America.

Favourable views of the United States have fallen to 16 per
cent. That's lower than the 27 per cent who showed enthusiasm when Barack Obama
took office. And "lower even than the 22 per cent who expressed a positive
opinion of the U.S.
in 2008, President George W. Bush's final year in the White House," says
Pew.

Mitch Potter is the Star's Washington Bureau Chief, his third
foreign posting after previous assignments to London
and Jerusalem.
Potter led the Toronto Star’s coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
where he won a 2006 National Newspaper Award for his reportage. His dispatches
include datelines from 33 countries since 2000. Follow him on Twitter: @MPwrites

05/08/2013

Russia and America have agreed to hold an international conference, as early as the end of May to find a way to end Syria's civil war. The starting point will be last year's Geneva Communique which called for a negotiated, political transition made up of both sides in the war, but left unanswered the question of what would happen to President Bashar Assad.

The reaction so far has been pretty negative -- largely on the issue of Assad's future.

Moaz Al-Khatib who last month resigned as head of the National Opposition Coalition said: "Syrians: be careful of squandering your revolution in international conference halls."

Syrian National Coalition spokesman Khaled Saleh told VOA that peace would begin with the departure of Assad and his inner circle but also seemed to leave open the possibility of talking to the president.

"If the Assad regime is serious, I believe it can start by releasing 200,000 prisoners in its jails, it can start by pulling its military out of the cities," he said.

Colonel Qassim Saadeddine, a spokesman for the rebel Supreme Military Council told Reuters that armed fighters would not be involved in the conference: "Unfortunately I don't think there is a political solution left for Syria. I think that is clear by now. We will not sit with the regime for dialogue. And frankly, I don't think Assad's decisions are really in Russia's hands. Right now he is only looking toward Iran."

@RevolutionSyria, a rebel group tweeted sarcastically: "Wow! We’ve cracked it. We’re going to have another conference but this time will also invite the killers!"

And: "You don’t negotiate with or reward murderers, rapists or child killers; you bring them to justice. Assad & gangs must face justice."

Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN-Arab League peace envoy, struck a more optimistic note. In a statement he said: "This is the first hopeful news concerning that unhappy country in a very long time. The statements made in Moscow constitute a very significant first step forward. It is nevertheless only a first step."

Hamida Ghafour is
a foreign affairs reporter at the Star. She has lived and worked in the Middle
East and Asia for more than 10 years and is the author of a book on
Afghanistan. Follow her on Twitter @HamidaGhafour

05/01/2013

The slogan is "some things can’t be covered" and
the campaign is called "No More Abuse."

This is Saudi Arabia’s unusually frank effort to
combat domestic violence. The shocking photograph above of a woman with a black eye
is rare in a society where confronting social issues head on is very much
frowned upon. Saudis prefer to do things quietly, by stealth, if at all.
Admitting social shortcomings in front of a global audience is even more
remarkable. The advertising campaign is being run by the King Khalid Foundation charity so it has approvals at the highest levels of government.

I recently spoke to Mona al Abdat, who
manages a counselling centre in Jeddah. She told me that her staff of
three could not keep up with the demand for help from victims of domestic
violence.

"Some of them we refer to psychiatrists
because they need medication. People who are sexually abused, beaten by a
father, beaten by a husband,” she told me. “Really I am scared now
because it is becoming more and more. The counselors we have at the centre
really sometimes they don’t have any spots. There are waiting lists."

On the positive side, she said the waiting lists
were a sign of progress that people were willing to reach out and perhaps the
stigmas were fading.

There are no reliable statistics on domestic
violence - the federal authorities in 2009 said there were 257 cases, but some
of these were abuse against men. This must be a huge understatement in a
country with a population of about 28 million.

Under Saudi Arabia's harsh interpretation of
Sharia law, females must receive permission from male guardians to have an
education, work or travel. Obviously this leaves women in an extremely
vulnerable position.

There is no law that criminalizes violence
against women, either. This is something women's activists have been pushing
for with no luck, along with a law to outlaw child abuse particularly after the
horrific rape and murder of a 5-year-old girl at the hands of her father.

The "No More Abuse" campaign comes after
several other steps towards women's emancipation carried out under the rule of
King Abdullah. In the 2015, elections women will have the right to stand for local office.

This year women were given 30 positions on the previously
all-male shura council. Although the 150-member body has no real political
power, it only proposes laws for the king who rules with absolute authority, it
was a development. Women can now ride bikes in restricted areas.
Under previous rulings women were banned from doing so because it was
considered too sexually explicit.

But the king has a long way to go before his
female subjects reach any kind of equality. Saudi Arabia placed 131 in the
World Economic Forum's ranking of 135 countries in last year’s gender gap
report which measured economic, political, social disparities between men and
women.

Hamida Ghafour is
a foreign affairs reporter at the Star. She has lived and worked in the Middle
East and Asia for more than 10 years and is the author of a book on
Afghanistan. Follow her on Twitter @HamidaGhafour

04/29/2013

Photojournalist Tim Hetherington was often described as “larger than life”
and a visionary, but it is only in death that his vision has been fully
understood.

Sebastian Junger, who produced the Oscar-nominated film Restrepo with Hetherington in Afghanistan, seems to come
closest to showing what motivated his friend in his documentary Which Way Is the Front Line From Here?

The documentary follows Hetherington’s life as a war photographer from his
early days in Sierra Leone to his final days in Misrata, Libya, where he was
killed by mortar blast in 2011. Hetherington was 40.

In an interview, Junger spoke about his friend, his film and a war
correspondent’s vexing combination of selflessness and selfishness.

“You’re doing something dramatic, glamorous and potentially deadly — and
incredibly urgent and important. But (war correspondents) are also personally
really complicated and sometimes messy people and you don’t realize that looking
in from the outside.”

While Junger has captured his friend’s life on film, Hetherington’s own
photos also chart the stages of his professional life. Reflecting on those
assignments in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Afghanistan and finally Libya, Junger
explains how these places pushed Hetherington forward, shaped his work and
helped him get closer in his quest to understand war.

- Michelle Shephard

SIERRA LEONE, POST-WAR, started him
off in his career. I think a lot of combat reporters would yawn at the idea of
doing portraits at a school for blind children … but Tim saw something very beautiful there.
That was Tim, seeing the thing that everyone elsewas ignoring or thought was boring. … I think it also sensitized
him to the consequences of war and made him curious. Why would people do this?”
(Photo taken in 1999)

IT WAS INCREDIBLY DANGEROUS,” JUNGER SAYS OF HETHERINGTON'S first war reporting
in Liberia. “They really weren't
soldiers. They were militias filled with teenagers who were pretty out of
control.” But Junger says among war correspondents there's a similar boyish
thrill to being inside a war and he believes Hetherington may have discovered
this in Liberia. “Addictive is too strong a
word, but it makes it really irresistible at times.”
(2003)

HETHERINGTON and Junger were
embedded with U.S. soldiers
in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley — a remote 15-man outpost
considered the most dangerous posting in the war — while filming “Restrepo,”
named after a medic who had been killed. The photo shows a soldier screaming
with pain after getting a “pink belly” for his birthday. Each member of the
platoon struck his stomach until blood could be seen. “That fraternal bond was
absolutely possible, so I think for the first time Tim felt he was becoming more
and more indistinguishable from the guys we were covering,” said Junger. “We
identified with them tremendously, which I know is a huge journalistic no-no,
but we weren't trying to be objective, we were trying to understand their
experience. That was very different for both of us.”
(2008)

HETHERINGTON'S DEATH PUSHED JUNGER
TO STOP REPORTING FROM war zones. Hetherington had often said he wanted to stop
and before he left for Libya he told friends he didn't
intend to go to the front line. “But it has a huge gravitational pull,” said
Junger. “I know exactly how he felt, ‘Oh my God it's all happening right there. We
have complete access. Let's go.' He went because it's exciting — in a word. He
went because it's incredibly exciting.” Hetherington took this picture in
Misrata after a fierce fight between rebels and army soldiers. It was his last
photograph. (2011)

04/26/2013

British prime minister David Cameron has weighed
in today on the question of whether the Syrian regime is using chemical weapons
telling the BBC there is "limited but growing" evidence that troops have used
poison gas. It follows the U.S. administration's assertion yesterday that
American intelligence had "varying degrees of confidence"
that the regime has used the nerve agent sarin on a "small
scale" but corroborated, conclusive evidence is needed.

So far, soil samples or physiological evidence
were examined by the British, American and French outside Syria. This presents
a set of problems if America and its allies are considering intervening in
Syria on the basis that President Bashar Assad has, in Barack Obama's phrase,
crossed a "red line."

The incidents are not linked to specific,
credible events, observes Jeffrey Lewis, a leading expert on nuclear
non-proliferation.

"First, the allegation of chemical weapons
use needs to be specific to a time and place. We need a date, time, location,
and (ideally) the identity of the Syrian unit in question. What we want to be
sure of is that an actual military attack occurred that resulted in
victims. Second, once we have an attack, we need victims of that
attack. These victims, who can credibly be placed on the receiving end of
the attack, will provide blood or urine samples that show sarin
use."

He continued: "We have to be certain that
any sarin exposure resulted from an attack. Having set a red line
for U.S. involvement to deter Assad, we’ve also created an incentive for
certain groups to tell stories that might result in more U.S. assistance. As
I’ve noted before, these groups don’t appear particularly scrupulous when it
comes to the truth. So I’d be very, very careful about leaping to
conclusions."

The battlefield is unpredictable. Lewis recalled
that in 1991 American soldiers detonated a pit of munitions at Khamisiyah
in Iraq only to discover that the munitions contained sarin, exposing thousands
of U.S. service personnel to low levels of sarin.

"There are many ways that Free Syrian Army
fighters might find themselves exposed to sarin. I still think caution is
important," he wrote.

The UN is waiting for Syria to allow a team of
investigators inside the country to examine claims that chemical weapons are
being used. This may be the best chance of establishing the full truth.

But how likely is it that the Syrian regime, if
indeed it has gassed people, would allow the UN access?

Syria is not a signatory to the Chemical Weapons Convention but the use of chemical weapons is a war crime under
international law and attackers would be hauled in front of an international court.

Hamida Ghafour is
a foreign affairs reporter at The Star. She has lived and worked in the Middle
East and Asia for more than 10 years and is the author of a book on
Afghanistan. Follow her on Twitter @HamidaGhafour

04/25/2013

U.S. Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel told reporters in Abu Dhabi today that the regime has likely used the nerve agent sarin on a "small scale."

This YouTube clip was sent by an activist on Twitter who told me that the footage was filmed in Jobar, Damascus on April 14. She said two were dead, 30 people suffering breathing problems, red eyes and a few had fallen into a coma.

A team of United Nations investigators are in Cyprus and expected
to examine soil samples and refugees. The team is not going inside Syria. Jeffrey Feltman, UN under-secretary for political affairs, told
the UN Security Council on Wednesday:

“The secretary-general [Ban Ki-moon]'s position is that, at
this time, the mission should investigate the allegations pertaining to
incidents in Aleppo and Homs. While awaiting access to the Syrian territory,
the experts of the mission are studying the information on the alleged
incidents of the use of chemical weapons provided to them by member states. They remain ready to deploy to Syria within
24 to 48 hours following the Syrian government's acceptance of the modality and
the scope of the mission.”

Hamida Ghafour is
a foreign affairs reporter at the Star. She has lived and worked in the Middle
East and Asia for more than 10 years and is the author of a book on
Afghanistan. Follow her on Twitter @HamidaGhafour

04/17/2013

Beach in Tartous, Syria, where many Alawites live. (Jean-Luc MANAUD/Gamma-Rapho)

Peter Harling, one of the most thoughtful commentators on Syria has written an incisive piece on how the religious minority to which President Bashar Assad belongs is clinging to power as Syria falls apart.

The Alawites, the most historically oppressed minority in Syria, rose to prominent positions with the rise of the Assad family. Household servants became civil servants. Peasants got land. But the Assads established their supremacy at the expense of the Alawites. Respected tribal leaders, intellectuals and competent militarymen were shunted aside in favour of yes-men to expand the family’s power.

This state of division and disarray is the key to the regime’s “extraordinary resilience,” Harling writes. And reversing the emancipation is what Alawites fear most if the regime falls.

"Such dread is founded in the precariousness of the condition in which the regime has maintained ‘Alawis. By neglect and by design, their ascent was never translated into integration. Thanks to a lack of urban planning, ‘Alawis congregated in informal neighborhoods such as Damascus’ Mezze 86, which stood out for their sectarian homogeneity. They relied to a greater extent than any other group on the regime.”

He continues: “They assumed a conspicuous role in local administrations (in Homs, for instance), state-run media outlets (such as al-Baath newspaper and, more recently, al-Dunya television) and key state institutions (notably the officer corps of the army). They were most visible, and in the worst possible way, in sprawling security services that operated outside the law and outside formal state institutions. Finally, although Bashar reached out to the Sunni Arab majority far more than his father did, he ushered in hereditary rule as a hallmark of the regime’s communal nature, and he abetted the uninhibited corruption of his immediate relatives, including the domination of the economy by his cousin Rami Makhlouf. As the Asads and their relatives expanded their control over both state institutions and the private sector, Syria came to look like a family farm. All told, ‘Alawis were not amalgamated into society as much as they were absorbed into a fictional state, leaving them alien and exposed."

One speculation about the war’s endgame is that Assad would leave Damascus, by choice or force, and take the Alawites back to their mountain homeland. But Harling says this is the last thing they want.

As a result, "Alawis have everything to lose, nowhere to go and no one to follow, other than a leader they profess to love and in reality loathe," he writes.

The war continues, becoming more savage and sectarian as the body count increases and the possibility of a peaceful end remote.

Hamida Ghafour is a foreign affairs reporter at the Star. She has lived and worked in the Middle East and Asia for more than 10 years and is the author of a book on Afghanistan. Follow her on Twitter @HamidaGhafour

04/15/2013

A man stands
shocked in the remains of a house following an airstrike by the Syrian airforce
in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo on Monday. The conflict in Syria,
which is now in its third year, has cost 70,000 lives, according to the United
Nations.(DIMITAR DILKOFF/AFP/Getty Images)

Refugees International is saying that child marriages among Syrian refugees are on the rise.

One interesting and underreported aspect that is helping drive this phenomenan which the organization raises, is the soaring rent prices in Jordan.

Rents in Jordan have tripled as demand has increased but decent, available housing is falling and many families are falling into debt trying to keep a roof over their heads. The average debt of refugees in urban areas is $650, equivalent of three months rent, aid agencies report.

Marcy Hersh of Refugees International told AlertNet some landlords in Jordan were taking advantage of their tenants' misfortune.

“For example the landlord would say, ‘I know you can’t pay rent this month but we can make a deal where if you give me your daughter in marriage, then you won’t have to pay rent this month'. These sorts of impossible situations are coming up for families,” Hersh said.

In other cases well-meaning parents desperate to protect their daughters are marrying them off as soon as they can because overcrowded housing increases the risk of sexual violence. Last year there were an estimated 500 underage marriages in Jordan.

When I was in Amman last month I spoke to a couple of Syrian exiles who were annoyed at the attention early marriage was getting in the West. They correctly pointed out that many Syrians were marrying their children early even before the war.

"Stop telling us about early marriage, I've had enough of hearing about it," one highly educated Syrian refugee told me. "We have more needs."

He meant that focusing on this issue was distracting from other urgent needs such as food and accommodation. It was a fair point. Early marriages however are also a sign of the strain families are under as they try to survive with scarce help and resources.

Erica Hall of World Vision, said that more children would likely be forced into marriage as the humanitarian crisis deteriorated, AlertNet reported.

“It is linked to levels of poverty and deprivation, so obviously as the situation gets more and more dire for refugees in Lebanon and Jordan I think there is a huge concern that it’s going to increase.”

Hersh also added that girls and women who had been raped during the civil war were being forced into marriage to save family honour.

Hamida Ghafour is a foreign affairs reporter at the Star. She has lived and worked in the Middle East and Asia for more than 10 years and is the author of a book on Afghanistan. Follow her on Twitter @HamidaGhafour

04/12/2013

A cautious welcome from aid agencies working in war zones following the announcement by Foreign Minister John Baird that Canada will give $5 million this year to prevent sexual violence in conflict and help victims. The news came at Thursday's G8 foreign ministers meeting in London where member states committed a total of $36 million to the crisis.

Save the Children's Cicely McWilliam called it an "important first step" and said protecting children should be at the forefront of G8's humanitarian response to war. Up to 80 per cent of sexual violence victims in conflict are children, a recent report by the agency stated.

World Vision's Jonathan Papoulidis said he was "encouraged" by Baird's announcement but wanted more details about how the money would be spent. Canada should fund initiatives that establish a minimum set of protection standards for children during war, he added.

"These minimum standards do things like ensure there are enough sexual violence protection workers and programs in conflict zones to protect and help children,” he said.

War Child also welcomed the funding news. But the charity warned in a report earlier this week that there was a risk sexual violence was being narrowly defined as a women's and legal issue. Rape affected men, women, girls and boys - and it was endemic in conflict, it said.

"Once the veil of ignorance is lifted, through simple enquiry, the extent and brutality of sexual violence in conflict areas is so shocking that it requires us to ask fundamental questions about our understanding of humanitarian needs, and the purpose of our presence in conflict zones," Rob Williams, the charity's chief executive, said in the report.

Hamida Ghafour is a foreign affairs reporter at the Star. She has lived and worked in the Middle East and Asia for more than 10 years and is the author of a book on Afghanistan. Follow her on Twitter @HamidaGhafour

Legal Notice

TheStar.com
Copyright Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Toronto Star or www.thestar.com. The Star is not responsible for the content or views expressed on external sites.
Distribution, transmission or republication of any material is strictly prohibited without the prior written permission of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. For information please contact us using our webmaster form. www.thestar.com online since 1996.